5 Twitter Searches That Can Help You Find Customers

When it comes to marketing your business, two great things about Twitter are most people tweet their status updates publicly and they are easily searchable using Twitter as well as third party management tools.

This means that you can search for your ideal customers and potentially convert them in real time.

Monitoring Your Searches

Before we get started, let’s look at how you can keep track of your Twitter searches. First, you can simply use Twitter itself. Enter a query in the search box…

Save it using the settings wheel dropdown above the search results…

Find it again under Saved Searches when you click in the search box.

Alternatively, if you use a Twitter management tool like HootSuite, you can keep an on-going real time search by adding it as a stream in your dashboard. Click the Add Stream button, select your Twitter profile, and enter your search query…

Review the latest tweets in your HootSuite column whenever you can…

You can also use other Twitter management tools like Tweetdeck to achieve the same constant monitoring.

Example Twitter Searches

The following are five Twitter searches you can use to discover customers that are ready to buy.

Can anyone recommend…

One popular query that Twitter users run by their followers is recommendations on a specific product or service. As you can see just from the following examples, “Can anyone recommend…” is by people looking for websites, shoes, contractors, movies, and WordPress themes.

To get these results from a Twitter search, use the following search query, replacing keyword with keywords for the products or services you have to offer.

“can anyone recommend” keyword

Depending on your products and services, you may want to create multiple searches as people tend to refer to common items differently, such as the above example which shows someone asking about trainers instead of shoes.

Any recommendations…

Similar to the above search, some people are a little more casual when asking for recommendations.

To get these results from a Twitter search, use the following search query, replacing keyword with keywords for the products or services you have to offer.

“any recommendations” keyword

Another tip: if you are a local business, you may want to try adding in a location modifier by using the following.

“any recommendations” keyword near:”phoenix” within:50mi

This will help you find tweets from customers in your area. It helps if you are a contractor searching for people in Phoenix to weed out people tweeting from New York.

In the market for a…

Although not as popular, some people preface their shopping intentions by saying they are in the market for a certain something.

To get these results from a Twitter search, use the following search query, replacing keyword with keywords for the products or services you have to offer.

“in the market for a” keyword -http

For any of your Twitter searches, if you notice an excess of links from people advertising, just add -http. This will get rid of most of the tweets from advertisers and reveal tweets from buyers.

Who has the best deal on…

Does your business offer great discounts? Get in on conversations from people looking for them.

To get these results from a Twitter search, use the following search query, replacing keyword with keywords for the products or services you have to offer.

“who has the best deal on” keyword -http

Not sure what to get…

Gift giving happens all year long, so don’t worry if you haven’t capitalized on this holiday season. People who need gift recommendations will often share that they are not sure what to get a specific person for birthdays, holidays, etc.

To get these results from a Twitter search, use the following search query, replacing keyword with keywords for the products or services you have to offer.

“not sure what to get” keyword -http -me

Add in the -me to get rid of search results where people are telling their followers what to get them as a gift for a special occasion.

What are your favorite queries to search for when prospecting for new customers on Twitter?

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